After being dogged for a quarter-century to pay $26 million in back taxes on his stock options, former pharmaceutical mogul Richard A. Cramer gave up three artworks yesterday to shave his tab a bit.

The paintings, seized and auctioned by the Internal Revenue Service, fetched just $250,000 at Cirker’s auction house – not even enough to cover two months of interest owed on his whopping tax bill.

The modern abstracts by Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella were just a few of the assets located and liquidated by the IRS, including Cramer’s East 57th Street co-op near Sutton Place.

Cramer is being charged about $140,000 a month interest, or 6 percent compounded annually on his back-tax bill, which currently stands at $27.8 million. The lien had been as high as $36 million in 1994.

Cramer got into his tax jam in 1982 when he sold his private medical instruments firm IMED Corp. to Warner-Lambert, and collected $32.2 million for all his privately held options in IMED. He also took a seat on Warner-Lambert’s board.

However, several years prior to that sale, Cramer placed a zero value on his options because they weren’t publicly traded stock, and avoided any tax payments, saymtax court files.

Cramer later claimed in his 1982 tax filing after selling his options that they were subject to favorable capital gains tax rates. But the IRS said that since he earlier claimed the options had a zero market value, they had to be taxed as ordinary income at the highest rate – thus, he owed $10.7 million in added taxes.

For years, Cramer haggled in tax court but lost each time while the interest clock swelled his bill.

It wasn’t clear where the original proceeds of his $32.2 million options windfall are located. The paintings were seized from a family trust.